"Frances," he had said, with the solemnity of a Capuchin friar taking his vows; "Frances, if you cast me off I shall go to the devil!" Frances was very sorry, and very reproachful, and withal, not a little nattered by this evidence of her negative influence; but she gave him her blessing and let him go, whither he would; and he, with the inconsequent obstinacy of his nature, carried with him a perfectly unimpaired ideal of her, sustained by her tearful assurance that she should always love him and pray for him. Even when he heard within the year that she was about to make a brilliant marriage with a titled Frenchman whom she had met at Newport, he persisted in thinking of her as the victim, not of her own inconstancy, but of parental sternness. He sometimes saw her pretty face quite distinctly before his eyes, as he looked out across the swiftly spinning wheel, into the smoke-hung barroom,--the pretty face with the tearful eyes and the quivering lip of shallow feeling, the sincerity of which nothing could have made him doubt,--and somehow that pictured face had always the look of loving and praying for him. There was a certain little ring, bearing a design of a four-leaved clover done in diamonds, a trinket of her girlhood days, which she used to let him wear "for luck." He had it on his little finger the day his father was sentenced. Its potency might fairly have been questioned after that, yet when she took it back he felt as if the act must have a blighting influence upon his destinies, quite apart from the broken engagement which it marked. He had accepted for the nonce a place at the foot of the ladder in a bankers' and brokers' office which was offered him by one of the partners, an old friend of his father's. He held the place for some months, and, being quite devoid of ambition, he soon came to loathe the daily grind. Through that, as through, the later vicissitudes of his career, his mind clung, with a curious, mechanical persistency, to that troublesome vow which he had made.